How water could be a dieter’s best friend

We can go without food for weeks, but we will only survive without water for 2 days in extreme (desert) heat and a maximum of 10 days in a much colder climate. As soon as a person loses just 2.5% of their body weight from water loss, they lose 25% of their physical and mental abilities!

So water really is ‘the stuff of life’. Here are some top tips for how water can also be a dieter’s best friend:

1. Hungry or thirsty? One of the best diet tips of all is to drink a glass of water any time you think you are hungry. It is estimated that 75% of people are dehydrated much of the time and they are actually ‘hungry’ for liquid (water), not food. In a University of Washington study, one glass of water was found to shut down midnight hunger pangs in almost 100% of the dieters. Fruit can be 95% water and even meat can be as high as 75% water, so the body will try to get water in whatever way it can.

2. Water retention. Water retention can happen for many reasons. Women tend to retain water at the time of the month. Any body can hold water (like a camel) in hot weather and water retention can be a physiological reaction to a food eaten (food intolerance). A classic mistake that people make, when suffering water retention, is to drink less water. We need to drink more, to encourage the kidneys to produce urine and dilute this urine, so that it is passed more regularly.

3. We are mostly water! The human body is about 60% water in men and 55% in women. We should never try to lose water weight using diuretics. We should lose weight through a healthy (real food) diet (like The Harcombe Diet), so that water and fat will be lost at the same time, keeping the proportion of water in the body roughly constant.